To: Detroit/Seattle Workers' Voice mailing list
August 10, 2021
RE: Resumption of publication; growing climate crisis

Resumption of the D/SW list

The previous issue of the D/SWV list was dated June 1, 2021 ("Palestinian Lives Matter"). Since then, there have been no issues until today. This is because I contracted COVID-19, and I spent June, July, and the start of August in a hospital, and then a rehabilitative facility. I was fully vaccinated in February, but I am also immunocompromised with CLL. The Moderna vaccine did, however, seem to limit the damage that COVID did to me. I am now home and resuming work on the list. As the  climate crisis is deepening, and the UN's IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) has issued its new report on how close the world is to utter disaster, the next few issues of the list will deal with the environmental crisis. 

— Joseph Green, editor, D/SWV list

The heat wave in July:
Build a working class movement  to stop the earth from burning!

by Pete Brown, Detroit Workers' Voice

The heat wave of early July shows that tipping points are beginning to be tipped over. Global warming is now accelerating and will be impossible to stop, though it might be slowed. In the past occasional bouts of extreme heat were normal in the arid southwestern U.S.  But today, with the entire western U.S. suffering drought and many hundreds of people being killed by heat in northwest U.S. and Canada, it’s no longer a question of suffering through occasional hot weather; it’s a question of human survival under inhuman conditions. Frightening details about the recent heat wave have been news events around the globe. In the Northwest it was 106 degrees in Seattle and even hotter – 114 – in Portland. In British Columbia, Vancouver was hit hard, and inland the temperature hit 121 degrees, a historic high for all of Canada. Hundreds of people succumbed to the abnormal heat, which threatens to become the new normal. (1) The social-democratic prime minister of British Columbia cruelly brushed off the deaths with the remark, “There are always fatalities,” showing that the U.S. is not the only place with climate-denialist zombies. (2)

The heat spread inland to Spokane, then to Idaho and Montana, where record high temperatures were also recorded. Further south, other parts of the West were also extremely hot, though people there are more used to it. It was 121 in Las Vegas, for instance. Extreme heat also settled on the northeastern U.S., Europe and even Siberia. At least nine people died in Paris from the heat, and for the first time ever in July the thermometer went over 97 degrees in Britain. (3)

In the western U.S. the sudden heat wave came on top of a years-long drought that is drying up forests and lakes and leading to battles over water. In California farmers are locked in struggles with Indigenous tribes and with cities over water rights. In Utah the Great Salt Lake has shrunk from evaporation. (4)  Lake Mead, the reservoir behind Hoover Dam, has fallen to its lowest level since the 1930s, when the dam was built. The lake is a lifeline for 25 million people in three states and waters millions of acres of farmland. But today it is only one-third full. (5) Even Hawaii is suffering a decades-long drought even though it includes some of the wettest places on Earth; wildfires are raging there as they are throughout the West. (6)

Recent events and long-term trends illustrate the importance of climate tipping points. A recent study of long-term mortality statistics in India shows that thousands of people there have succumbed to the heat the past few decades, as heat waves have increased in frequency and intensity. (7) The Indian government refuses to recognize this, doesn’t keep statistics about it and has no plans to do anything about it. Prime Minister Modi’s Hindu nationalist government is just as climate-denialist as right-wing Trumpists in the U.S. But the murderous heat pays no attention to national boundaries or wordsmith politicians and goes on killing people – especially poor working people laboring outside.

We have been warning about climate tipping points at least since 2007, when we published Joseph Green’s article, “The coming of the environmental crisis”. (8) Today tipping points are falling over and feeding off one another. The warming of Siberia and the Arctic is melting permafrost and releasing methane, a greenhouse gas much more potent than carbon dioxide. The warming of the oceans is causing the Gulf Stream to slow down, which will have long-term effects on weather in Western Europe. (9) The atmosphere is trapping twice as much heat today as it did 15 years ago (10); thus, even if carbon dioxide emissions stopped today, we’d still have a hotter climate and getting worse. It’s no longer a case of wondering about climate change in the future. Climate change is here, today, and it’s murderous.

Nonetheless, the bourgeois media and politicians go on ignoring the climate crisis and the mounting death toll. The hundreds killed by the recent heat wave barely got a mention by the news media. And bourgeois politicians wouldn’t think of calling for a state of emergency, as this might disrupt profiteering. President Joe Biden raises as his utmost concern the need to find common ground with Senate Republicans who are overwhelmingly Trumpists, many of them outright climate-change denialists. Biden says the climate crisis is “the existential crisis of our time”, but he doesn’t act like it. Instead he spends his time working out compromises with the Trumpists, fiddling while Rome burns.

Despite some divisions, the capitalists as a whole are committed to fossil-fuel energy, and their advice to the working masses is to wait and patiently endure while they go on making profits. But the mounting death toll shows we cannot afford to wait. We need, immediately, measures to slow down and stop global warming. Such measures were outlined in Joseph  Green’s 2007 article. They include: the need for direct regulation of greenhouse gas emissions; and democratic planning of production. “Direct regulation” means direct control, not reliance on market measures that may someday have some effect (but in practice don’t). “Democratic planning” means the masses getting involved instead of being restricted to working and consuming. Planning production will not work if the masses are not involved, making decisions and checking to see that enterprises are adhering to guidelines. And neither of these will come about without mass participation in politics. The time is ripe for building a working class movement for the environment, a movement that puts the interests of workers and a healthy environment ahead of capitalist profits. []

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